


You Were Mine

by adoxyinherear



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 16:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13593849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adoxyinherear/pseuds/adoxyinherear
Summary: Solavellan hell, I am in it.Pre-Trespasser, Lavellan's thoughts on Solas as she tries to lose herself in Frostback Basin.





	You Were Mine

I stand in the Avvar camp and stare down a foreign, unforgiving sea. The air is thin, briny, and seems to flay the bare skin of my face. I am reminded of the long hours of pain that accompanied my vallaslin - and of the exquisite seconds under your hands when you removed it.

The Avvar call us "lowlanders" and it is fitting - I have never felt so low.

\---

Dorian knows that I am not sleeping. He devises reasons to wake in the night to check on me - he complains, mostly. I have wrenched him from the comforts of Skyhold for the barbarian wilds. There is a "beastly odor" that rouses him or the violent moaning of a "rutting animal" interrupting his otherwise pleasant dreams. If Bull were here he'd make a joke, but the Chargers are busy elsewhere. I couldn't ask him to come because I know this is a selfish errand, to get as far away from what I've known as possible, to go somewhere that you and I did not - could not - will never - go.

Still I see the dim tracery of your footsteps in the fog ahead of me, feel your fingers in my hair at the touch of the fire's heat.

Dorian knows that I am not sleeping but he doesn't ask why. He brings me strong tea with a shot of something in it and I drink it.

\---

I feel my daggers bite deep into the alien flesh of a creature that has lingered too long in strangeness. _Fade-touched_. I smash a glass and time seems to slow as I cut and cut to get at the heart of the thing. Perhaps they are the same, this beast's heart and mine, twisted, yearning for the touch of another world.

For touch.

Three times I have walked in the Fade. You walked with me when the spirit of the Divine insisted that I must reclaim what parts of myself were taken from me by the Nightmare demon. But what if there were others? What if I regained some part of myself only to lose another?

I asked Cole if he could help me forget. I think he knows, in his way, that I like to have him here because he reminds me of you. He speaks in circles and I can listen between the words for meaning, for a truth I prefer to the one that I am living.

"Beating, breathing, dreaming. Are they fists or lips? One pain ends and another begins. The mark is a heart, a hollow, a hole-home to fall into, falling. Love."

He won't help me, of course.

He knows I don't really want him to.

\---

I don't know how long we can stay here. When we returned to camp, empty-handed and no closer to truly allying with the Avvar or to finding the remains of the last Inquisitor, Scout Harding asked if she should send word to Skyhold. She knows something, maybe. Or perhaps she turns her eyes to new horizons often enough that she can tell when someone is looking backwards.

\---

As a girl I thought my clan and the wilds we traveled the whole world, or the parts worth knowing, at least. It was in the keeper's stories that I first felt the thrill of exploration, the desire to see more, to go farther.

I felt the same way when I spoke with you, when we dreamed together in the Fade. Old forests grew young again, rivers flush with strange fish. Even the stars themselves seemed to shift. We slept in ruins made new again by the spirits that inhabited them; we speculated over the tastes of foods whose recipes were long lost, wondered over the expressions on faces many thousands of years lost in thought. We kissed before a statue whose visage neither of us recognized, not even restored in the Fade, and when you parted my lips with your tongue I felt the heat of an ancient sun burn the back of my throat and was sure that I heard the statue laughing.

I bore the anchor but you were mine.

Unmoored, I wander, a living ruin, afraid to dream.


End file.
